Category Archive

Again from Lemon Meringue Pantry, a page which as it emerges blinking into the bright light of the digital age should now become a primary source for all historians of the flexi disc.

See also ‘Disposable pop: a history of the flexi disc’.

You’ll have to excuse the embarrassing assertion about the Pastels.  The affair didn’t last long, but I confess I did play the ‘Million tears’ 12 inch half a million times.

Shame the Shamen didn’t make the flexi chart that featured on the following page.  Their Wayward Wednesday in May affair dates from well before they encountered ‘Ebeneezer Goode’; both ‘Four letter girl’ and ‘Stay in Bed’ are classic examples of moody eighties psychedelia which at the time made them seem like the negative to the positive of the Jasmine Minks.  Acid or mushrooms rather than ecstasy, I guess.

Let’s give you that all-important flexi top ten:

1. The Oinklettes – The Oink song (Marc Riley in disguise and as part of a team launching a new comic called Oink!)
2. The Chesterfields – Nose out of joint
3. The Jam – Boy about town
4. The Pastels – I wonder why
5. The Soup Dragons – If you were the only girl in the world…
6. The Laughing Apple – Wouldn’t you
7. A Riot Of Colour – Skink (‘While you were out, I changed my address…’)
8. The Shop Assistants – Home again
9. Laugh – Take your time yeah!
10. XTC – Looking for footprints

It gives me great pleasure to report that David Nichols’ sense of humour is well and truly intact.

And if (among other things) photos of dilapidated Australian railway stations tickle your fancy, as they do mine, then check out the rest of David’s blog.

I think David (and you) might like Nothing to see here.

The second contributed page to Lemon Meringue Pantry, split in two.  The cartoonist is David Nichols, who produced comics and a fanzine called Distant Violins.  The comic that came my way was Soon, featuring strips such as ‘Pebbles of the dead’ and ‘The day the world caught fire’; David’s extraterrestrial humour emboldened me to ask for more of the same for my fanzine.  He also drummed – or rather percussed – for the Cannanes, whose Bored, angry and jealous EP was released the following year (1987).  Its rough acoustics and heavy dose of sarcasm in the form of ‘You’re so groovy’ bear up well after all these years.  They’re still going, albeit without David, who went on to write and then revise a history of the Go-Betweens (Verse Chorus Press, 2003), a book which in giving an affectionate but not reverential account of the group very much does them justice.

David’s humour – at least as it stood twenty years ago – comes from a not dissimilar well to that drawn upon by Nicholas Gurewitch for the Perry Bible Fellowship.  The execution, of course, is different, with David offering something akin to the early Cannanes’ sound – rough, ready and spontaneous – while Gurewitch varies his style and colouring to suit his absurdist ideas, more often than not finessing them to perfection.